Immortals
2021 · 10m · UK
Directed by Daniel Robinson
Genres: action, animation, sci-fi
Tones: mythic, theatrical
Four immortal heroes must defend Earth from Ares, a powerful villain who wields a new super weapon capable of destroying the planet. A fully CG-animated proof-of-concept short produced by a four-person team.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Four immortals vs. Ares is the exact mythic-superhero premise that gets greenlit by committees—Robinson's doing nothing to subvert it, just executing it competently with better render farms than his peers, which is the opposite of what interests me.
A technically assured proof-of-concept that understands its lineage in animated superhero rhetoric, but without the formal rigor or editorial conviction that would make it sit meaningfully in that tradition rather than simply replicate its surface.
What makes this work isn't the scope—it's that Robinson and a four-person team squeezed professional-grade VFX choreography out of student constraints by making the hard call to keep camera work dynamic and spatial relationships crystal clear, which is the restraint decision most overambitious shorts miss.